Monday, March 10, 2008

Students for a Democratic Society are on the move at UBC. Their secret is perpetual action and constant outreach. This is one of the most vibrant campus activism movements in English North America.

On the last day of their week-long Resisting the University conference they called for a demonstration. Nearly one hundred students gathered on the Knoll (the last free-access grassy and treed spot on the UBC campus) with banners and signs and megaphones in hand.

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Below are photos of this spontaneous act of resistance..

They marched to the registrar’s offices to demand no tuition.

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They marched to the central library to protest the military propaganda of its lobby..

They marched to the president’s office to demand a hearing. He was off campus.

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They barged into the BOG/Senate boardroom to interrupt a planning meeting and to be heard.

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They promised that board meeting would be interrupted until students had a democratic voice in campus “development”. They rejected the empty talk of unelected board members and resolved to save the campus from appointed corporate stooges.

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They went to the construction site where their campus is being torn up without student consent.

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They stopped the bulldozers for a brief moment of sanity.

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And they took the Knoll.

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I can report that the SDS and the Wreath Underground are strong tiles in a mosaic of resistance that is emerging on the UBC campus.

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As they prepare to act directly on the economic levers that illegitimately transform a stolen campus, as they gauge the effectiveness of their strategies, and measure the risks they are willing to take to be in solidarity with the victims of the machine, one can sense that things are going to change.

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One can sense that this is a school for activists who will be liberated from the pathology of pacifism to enter life in defence of the dying..